In some situations, nucleic acid target sequence detection is needed for medical and research applications. For example, it may be used in personalized medicine to prescribe the most effective drug for a patient based on his or her genetic make-up. Nucleic acid target sequence detection may also be helpful in diagnosing certain infectious diseases by distinguishing between different strains of pathogens. It may also be used in a variety of research studies that involve understanding specific allele sequences present in an individual or model organism. The conventional strategy to detect nucleic acid target sequences is to use methods that require expensive machinery or the use of expensive materials such as fluorescent probes. For example, DNA target sequence detection using a conventional Taqman assay may sometimes be multiple times more expensive than the method described herein.
Accordingly, there is a need for lower cost methods for facilitating detection of target sequences corresponding to nucleic acid strands such as, for example, RNA and single stranded DNA (ssDNA).